28 June 2008

What the whales become

Richard Black reports a peaceful outcome to the meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Santiago de Chile, at least compared to earlier acrimony over moves to expand quotas.

Elsewhere (The 'value' of protecting whales), he looks at what some see as paradoxes or inconsistencies in the positions taken by countries such as the U.S. and Australia towards different whale species [1], and articulates a widely shared question about the wisdom of relying solely on economic valuation to protect whales and other life forms.

Regarding value, a version of the question goes back in industrialised countries at least as far as Henry David Thoreau, who wrote "can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?"[2]

Thoreau's question is highlighted up by Susan Tomes in her mixed review of David Rothenberg's Thousand Mile Song [3]. Tomes is surely right to say that contemporary western attitudes towards whales were heavily influenced by the discovery in the 1970s that the world's largest creatures were singing complex songs deep in the ocean; it had "great emotional power" at a time when the whole planet had become a theatre for MAD [4]. There was more to this than whales being'cute'.

That sensibility informs work such as that of Gregory Colbert, whose Ashes and Snow project has included images of the artist swimming with sperm whales [5].

Is more sympathy for whales likely in the 21st century? Is it inevitable?How will emotion, calculation, exploitation and triage interact? What if the times get darker and more destructive -- in which case, are there things still to learn from Thoreau's contemporary Herman Melville? [6]

Footnotes

1. A key example is the North Atlantic Right Whale and shipping. According to yet another piece by Black (Leading Edge, 26 June), six deaths a year is enough to extirpate the remaining population of around 300, so slow is their rate of reproduction; and six were killed last year. In July 2007 NOAA and the USCG implemented a scheme which they say will result in a substantial reduction in ship strikes. [The world's most endangered cetacean, the vaquita, lives in waters for which the U.S. and Mexico are jointly responsible. It's estimated that between about 40 to 80 of the remaining population of about 300 (sic) are killed every year in gillnets intended for the (also critically endangered) Totoaba.]

[In History of the Order Cetacea, published in 1834, the whaling master Capt. William Scoresby describes a fight between whalers and a whale over her calf. The mother whale comes to the surface, Scoresby writes, darting back and forth, stopping short or suddenly changing directions. She tosses up water, churning up the seas, refusing to leave her child even though three ships and harpoons approach. "She loses all regard for her own personal safety, in the anxiety for the preservation of her young; dashing through the midst of her enemies. There is something extremely painful in the destruction of a whale, when thus evincing a degree of affectionate regard for its young, that would do honour to the superior intelligence of human beings. Yet the objects of the adventure, the value of the prize, and the joy of the seamen with the capture, cannot be sacrificed in reflecting to the refined feelings of compassion."]

4. Like many people of my generation and background, I grew up with admiration of whales as a given. But I only really started to try to pay attention after actually seeing some whales, and doing a report for BBC radio in the mid 90s on the possible impact of something called ATOC on whale communication (see Noises off - The cacophony of human noise in the ocean grows louder by the year). The investigation had some unexpected turns. At one point I visited a researcher into animal hearing whose studies included desert tortoises being exposed to sonic booms. She would put them on a running machine geared down ten times and send them chasing after lettuce while playing loud noises to them. This was funny to see but actually a lot more sensible than some sunbeam-from-cucumber satire might have it. Since then, the oceans have got even noiser. See, for example, a lot has happened since then.

5. Of course, sperm whales don't sing in the way humpbacks and some other species do, but they have acquired charisma since the 70s too. By chance I was in Fayal in the Azores years ago when Colbert and his team were photographing this section of the project, and shared a meal with them. They were thoughtful and hospitable. Ashes and Snow is striking but it doesn't quite 'do it' for me; there is too much New Age/Fashionista/Leni Riefenstahl-Last of the Nuba body beautiful about it.

6. Consider, for example, the famous chapter The Whiteness of The Whale which shows some of what is so great about this extraordinary book, and also some of what is bad and dated about it ('bad' and 'dated' are not the same thing). By the way, Thoreau was about 34 when Moby Dick was published in 1851. Did he read it, and if so what did he think?

Most real creatures that we think we know embody wonders we have hardly dreamed of. And there are other beings, equally real, which for most of human experience have been beyond imagining. As Zhuangzi wrote some 2,300 years ago, “all the creatures in this world have dimensions that cannot be calculated.”

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. misattributed to Bertrand Russell

Since we cannot predict how ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.Derek Parfit

We are never 'at home': we are always outside ourselves.Michel de Montaigne

We are monkeys with money and guns.Tom Waits

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

Albert Einstein

If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside! Tristan Tzara

Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow.

Carl Woese

When you're young, all evolution lies before you...If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think how one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days.'Qfwfq'75 percent to 90 percent of all living species may remain unknown to science. IIES

Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.Roger Revelle (1957)

The rate of change of ocean acidity is many times faster than anything experienced in the last 55 million years. EPOCA

One cannot reasonably compare the K/T extinction with the current human destruction of the biosphere. The first was a relatively minor setback.

J.C. Briggs

When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.

The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go here on earth and probably far beyond.Martin Rees

Our quest, as a civilisation [is] to answer the question, how do we save ourselves from ourselves without losing ourselves?

Jaron Lanier

If you yourself want to become really happy...I suggest you save the albatross from extinction. It can be done.

Margaret Atwood

There is just one real problem -- the problem of human relations.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

Joseph Conrad

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:

"I deeply sympathize."

'The Walrus and the Carpenter'

We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more.

'The Giant, O'Brien'

We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

'Austerlitz'

Those were his first steps on a white sheet/Clutches of wriggling letters in black lead/Like tracks of worms on the Precambrian mud.

'Kaspar Hauser'

The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines.

Spinoza

We are as much automaton as mind.Blaise Pascal

Much that is intelligent in us is not specifically human. Alasdair MacIntyre

What knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?Herman Melville

There is no counting the possible ways to the Millennium and the route to it.Norman Cohn

By the time human beings start the global nuclear war that will destroy our civilization, there won’t be any great apes left for Earth to become the Planet of the Apes. But chances are there will still be plenty of rhesus macaques around.Dario Maestripieri

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.George Orwell

The astounding comes towards us, outrider of death and birth.John Berger

We are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirm there are many kinds thereof.

Thomas Browne

Even that old horse

is something to see

this snow-covered morning

Matsuo Basho

We cannot see the visible except with the invisible.

Eckhart von Hochheim

You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book.Paul Erdős

If, as the poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which serve best to pass away the long night.

Charles Darwin

But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor's heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most warn by the generations of pilgrims.

Jorge Luis Borges

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Let Peter rejoice with the MOON FISH who keeps up the life in the waters by night.Let Andrew rejoice with the Whale, who is array'd in beauteous blue and is a combination of bulk and activity.Let James rejoice with the Skuttle-Fish, who foils his foe by the effusion of his ink.Let John rejoice with Nautilus who spreads his sail and plies his oar, and the Lord is his pilot.Let Philip rejoice with Boca, which is a fish that can speak.